The SEI helps advance software engineering principles and practices and serves as a national resource in software engineering, computer security, and process improvement. The SEI works closely with defense and government organizations, industry, and academia to continually improve software-intensive systems. Its core purpose is to help organizations improve their software engineering capabilities and develop or acquire the right software, defect free, within budget and on time, every time.

Virtual System Integration

Architecture Centric Virtual Integration Practice

The SEI, research community, and industry have performed a number of pilot projects to demonstrate the practicality of the architecture-centric virtual integration approach. (See news, publications and project/initiatives sections at https://wiki.sei.cmu.edu/aadl).

The ongoing System Architecture Virtual Integration (SAVI) initiative by aerospace industry is maturing the virtual system integration approach into an industrial practice. SAVI members include Boeing Commercial, Airbus, Embraer, Rockwell Collins, BAE Systems, Honeywell, Goodrich, NASA, FAA, and the US. Army. The US. Army is also investigating virtual integration in the form of virtual system integration labs (Virtual SIL) to support acquisition of software-reliant systems.

The SEI has been engaged in integrating AADL into an architecture-centric engineering practice through a range of pilot projects and by frameworks and methods tailored to the model-based approach. See related technical reports here.

VUV method turning our understanding of the problem areas in embedded software systems that present challenges to developers into a systematic way of identifying potential technical risks in the software run-time architecture

Continued Research

The value of SAE AADL as a modeling notation with well-defined semantics has been recognized by the research community, and AADL has become a technology platform of choice in integrating analytical research technologies (See the AADL Wiki and In the News).

Building on this concept of virtual integration, SEI research in this area is currently focusing on

architecture fault modeling automating system safety and reliability analysis and validation to become a repeatable incremental process throughout the development lifecycle